>So what are you saying, that A is not A or that causality does not exist?

I leave those kinds of assertions to the pseudo-Objectivists in earlier threads who posted precisely that.

I merely posted a longish excerpt by Townes himself, whose detailed reminiscences of his conversations with Bohr and Von Neumann regarding the uncertainty principle and the possibility or impossibility of the maser contradict what Carver Mead claimed in his Spectator interview. Since you link to that interview and appear to rely on him as a source, I would say that Townes's details contradict your own position, too.

Since you're too busy replying before you've actually read the excerpt I posted above, here's a summary:

Von Neumann not only agreed with Townes that the maser could work without violating the uncertainty principle but even wrote about a laser-like invention in 1953 in a letter to Edward Teller.

Bohr snapped a peremptory agreement with Townes in Denmark regarding the possibility of a functional maser without violation of the uncertainty principle. Townes was unsure whether the agreement was real intellectual consent or merely professional politeness.

This is quite different from the whole attitude of Mead in the Spectator interview, which comes off as, "Ha! See how biased by their philosophical priors those old coots were! They arbitrarily asserted the laser could never exist, when it had already been invented!"

That's the spirt of Mead's position regarding the uncertainty principle. To say it was just a wee bit "out of context" would be unusually generous of me.

Anyway, regarding "causality", it's fairly obvious that you have only kind of causality in mind — mechanical determinism — and you leave out at least 2 others: chance (which is not simply the "lack of deterministic knowledge") and purpose (assumed by Aristotle to be operative everywhere, but since approximately Francis Bacon and later, Galileo, it is assumed, by definition, to operate only within living organisms, mainly those that are self-conscious (such as humans)).

>abolishing causality in favor of dice throwing in some areas.

"Dice throwing" , i.e., chance, is itself one kind of causality. It is not the lack of causality.

>Some may see this as a danger in that it leaves the way open to propose an unseen hand, or the hand of an intelligent designer, a modern term used to disguise theology,

??? Why is an unseen hand or the possibility of a designer "dangerous"? What are you afraid of?

"Intelligent design" means precisely and *literally* that. It doesn't require supernaturalism or a deity to have been the intelligent agent of design — though, much to the materialist's chagrin, it doesn't arbitrarily preclude that idea, either.

>This has little appeal to me as it falls to 'god of the gaps' meaning that whatever we still cannot explain we attribute to gods.

That's been debunked many times times already. Whether one's philosophical priors prefer gods to fill knowledge gaps, or matter and energy running deterministically like a big clock to fill the gaps, the procedure in science has always been "inference to the *best* explanation — whatever that might be — and not the politically correct explanation, i.e., the one that is shoe-horned into one's biases and pre-existing ideological assumptions about how the universe "ought" to work.

POST 2

(continued from above)

"How the Laser Happened:
Adventures of a Scientist"
by Charles H. Townes

Google Books online:

http://books.google.com/books?id=VrbD41G...

Chapter 5, "Maser Excitement — and a Time for Reflection"
pages 69-71

". . . I am not sure that I ever did convince Bohr. On that sidewalk in Denmark, he told me emphatically that if molecules zip through the maser so quickly, their emission lines must be broad. After I persisted, he said, "Oh, well, yes, maybe you are right," but my impression was that he was simply trying to be polite to a younger physicist. Von Neumann, after our first chat at the party in Princeton, wandered off and had another drink. In about 15 minutes, he was back. "Yes, you're right," he snapped. Clearly, he had seen the point. Von Neumann did seem very interested, and he asked me about the possibility of doing something like this at shorter wavelengths with semiconductors. Only later did I learn from his posthumous papers that he had already proposed — in a letter of September 19, 1953 to Edward Teller — producing a cascade of stimulated infrared radiation in semiconductors by exciting electrons, apparently by intense neutron radiation bombardment. Along with his calculations, Von Neumann gave a summary of his idea:

'The essential fact still seems to be that one must maintain a thermodynamic disequilibrium for a time t1 which is very long compared to the e-folding time t2 of some autocatalytic process that can be voluntarily induced to accelerate the collapse of this disequilibrium. In our present case, the autocatalytic agent is light — in the near infrared near 1.8 microns. There may be much better physical embodiments than such a mechanism. I have not gone into questions of actual use, on which I do have ideas which would be practical, if the whole scheme made sense . . .'

His idea was almost a laser, but he neither tried to use the coherent properties of stimulated emission nor thought of a reflecting cavity. There also seems to have been no reply from Teller, and the whole idea dropped from view. Later, in 1963, after the laser was well established, von Neumann's early thoughts and calculations were published; but by then, von Neumann had died, and I never had an opportunity to explore with him his thoughts of 1953, about which he modestly kept quiet after we had the maser operating."

(End excerpt)

This excerpt from Charles Townes's book paints quite a different picture of quantum scientists' reactions to the maser/laser invention. Carver Mead merely reports — inaccurately — that Bohr and Von Neumann denied it could exist, without reporting the FULL CONTEXT of the conversations between them and Townes, and that Von Neumann changed his mind 15 minutes + 1 drink later (and that Bohr might have changed his mind, though perhaps was doing so only to show politeness to a young American scientist). Meade also says nothing about Townes's own careful explanation of the uncertainty principle: that the maser/laser does NOT contradict it in any fundamental or literal way because no individual particle is being measured, observed, or tracked: only aggregates (i.e., populations).

This sort of careless, out-of-context research is done for an ideological purpose: Carver Mead wants to sell his book ("Collective Electrodynamics") via his interview in the Spectator, and DBHalling wants to sell Objectivist epistemology to readers of Galts Gulch Online. A more careful reading of history — especially by going back to original source material, such as Townes's own writings — offers something more valuable to potential consumers of these damaged goods: the old maxim, "caveat emptor."

POST 1:

"How the Laser Happened:
Adventures of a Scientist"
by Charles H. Townes

Google Books online:

http://books.google.com/books?id=VrbD41G...

Chapter 5, "Maser Excitement — and a Time for Reflection"
pages 69-71

"Before — and even after — the maser worked, our description of its performance met with disbelief from from highly respected physicists, even though no new physical principles were really involved. Their objections went much deeper than those that had led Rabi and Kusch to try to kill the project in its cradle; fully familiar with oscillators and molecular beams, these two never questioned the general Idea. They Just thought it was impractical and that it diverted department resources from basic physics and more sensible work.


Llewelyn H. Thomas, a noted Columbia theorist. told me that the maser flatly could not, due to basic physics principles, provide a pure frequency with the performance I predicted. So certain was he that he more or less refused to listen to my explanations. After it did work. he just stopped talking to me. tu me. A younger physicist in the department, even after the first successful operation of the device, bet me a bottle of scotch that it was not doing what we said it would (he paid up).


Shortly after we built a second maser and showed that the frequency was Indeed remarkably pure, I visited Denmark and saw Niels Bohr, the great physicist and pioneer in the development or quantum mechanics. As we were walking along the street together, he quite naturally asked what I was doIng. I descrIbed the maser and its performance. "But that is not possible," he exclaimed. I assured him it was. Similarly, at a cocktail party in Princeton. New Jersey, the Hungarian mathematician John von Neumann asked what I was workIng on. After I told him about the maser and the purity of Its frequency, he declared. "That can't be right!" But it was, I replied, and told him it was already demonstrated.


Such protests were not offhand opinions concerning obscure aspects of physics: they came from the marrow of these men's bones. These were objections founded on principle — the uncertainty principle. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle is a central tenet of quantum mechanics, among the core achievements during the phenomenal burst of creativity in physics during the first half of the twentieth century. It is as vital a pillar in quantum theory as are Newton's laws to classical physics. As its name implies, it describes the impossibility of achieving absolute knowledge of all aspects of a system's condition. It means that there is a price to be paid if one attempts to measure or define one aspect of a specific particle or other object to very great exactness. One must pay by surrendering knowledge of, or control over, some other feature.

The most commonly encountered illustration of the uncertainty principle is the impossibility of learning both a particle's position and its momentum to unconstrained accuracy. The scientist must sacrifice one to get the other. The problem lies in the nature of the universe, not in the shortcomings of instruments. A corollary, on which the maser's doubters stumbled, is that one cannot measure an object's frequency (or energy) to great accuracy in an arbitrarily short time. Measurements made over a finite time automatically impose uncertainty on the frequency.

To many physicists steeped in the uncertainty principle, the maser's performance, at first blush, made no sense at all. Molecules spend so little time in the cavity of a maser, about 1/10,000th of a second, that it seemed to those physicists impossible for the frequency of the radiation to also be narrowly confined. Yet that is exactly what we told them happened in the maser

There is good reason, of course, that the uncertainty principle does not apply so simply here. The maser does not inform one about the energy or frequency of any specific, clearly identified molecule. When a molecule is stimulated to radiate (in contrast with being left to radiate spontaneously) it must produce exactly the same frequency as the stimulating radiation. In addition, the radiation in a maser oscillator represents the average of a large number of molecules working together. Each individual molecule remains anonymous, not accurately measured or tracked. The maser's precision from principles that mollify the apparent demands of the uncertainty principle . . .